Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

Extract

‘While I, brought up to scoff rather than bless
And to say No, unless the facts require
A neutral verdict, for this once say Yes.’
(Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel.)

When the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia in 1401, they erected a triumphal monument with the skulls of the hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad who had not defended themselves.’ This quotation from Spengler begins Jacques Soustelle’s defence of French right-wing policy in Algeria (Le drame algérien et la décadence française. Réponse à Raymond Aron. Plon, 1957). The pamphlet might well have served the French left as a warning of how far Soustelle and his fellows were likely to go in defending their point of view. There is no such thing, proclaimed Soustelle—with some show of justification—as historical necessity, any more than there is such a thing as the inevitability of progress. There is no reason at all why we should believe in the ultimate triumph of Arab nationalism, of Pan-Arabism. A similar surrender to a feeling of inevitability in 732 would have stayed the hand of Charles Martel against the Moors, and in 1940 would have prevented de Gaulle from rallying the forces of Free France. There is no need to abdicate any position.

The historical references are a feature of Soustelle’s thinking which illustrate the fact that the revolt of May 13 was not entirely a question of Professors versus Colonels. Certainly in the case of Maurice Audin there is much more than a suspicion that the French army was willing to go to extreme lengths to silence intellectual opposition; but the civilian who espoused the army’s cause is himself an ex-academic of considerable ability who was, in addition, one of the first to join de Gaulle in 1940.